In his creative autobiography, The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí, the artist describes his process for generating the irrational images found in his early Surrealist paintings: “I spent the whole day seated before my easel, my eyes staring fixedly, trying to ‘see,’ like a medium...the images that would spring up in my imagination.” Few paintings demonstrate the hallucinatory results better than The First Days of Spring. Painted just a few months prior to his joining the Surrealist movement, it presents many of the Freudian symbols and irrational details that characterize his Surrealist period. It is also one of his first uses of collage, skillfully manipulating photos into his composition so that they are indistinguishable from the painted imagery. Dalí proudly referred to this work as a “veritable erotic delirium,” indicating that his goal was to create an abundance of shocking images, painted with astonishingly precise detail.

Sigmund Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams is the primary influence behind the painting. Freud proposed that the source of people’s fears, desires and neuroses can be found in their childhood experiences; Dalí places a photo of himself as a child in the center of this canvas, suggesting that various images in the painting might relate to his own childhood memories. A grey wasteland is the stage for his visions, where he places clusters of figures together as if connected through the free associations of dreams.

A survey of the canvas reveals extraordinary and disturbing details: a postcard of people on a ship enjoying a holiday, representing the audience Dalí wanted to shock; a taboo sexualized couple painted on top of the postcard; an image of a face with a grasshopper attached, recalling Dalí’s childhood fears; a dressed man mounting another dressed man; a father and son looking on from the far distance; an object in the foreground combining a colorful jug and fish with hair and numbers; and on the right, a figure of a young girl with an old man who resembles Freud. The First Days of Spring laid the groundwork for Dalí’s Surrealist career, with many of these images returning over the subsequent years.